Cassandra E-Book

Christa Wolf

• Herausgeber: Daunt Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Cassandra, daughter of the King of Troy, is endowed with the gift of prophecy but fated never to be believed. After ten years of war, Troy has fallen to the Greeks, and Cassandra is now a prisoner, shackled outside the gates of Agamemnon's Mycenae. Through memories of her childhood and reflections on the long years of conflict, Cassandra pieces together the fall of her city. From a woman living in an age of heroes, here is the untold personal story overshadowed by the battlefield triumphs of Achilles and Hector. This stunning reimagining of the Trojan War is a rich and vivid portrayal of the great tragedy that continues to echo throughout history. 'A beautiful work.' - Bettany Hughes ' Cassandra is fierce and feverish poetry that engages with the ancient stories while also charting its own path. Filled with passionate and startling insight into human nature.' - Madeline Miller, author of The Song of Achilles 'Christa Wolf wrote books that crossed and overcame the divide of East and West, books that have lasted: the great, allegorical novels.' - Günter Grass 'A sensitive writer of the purest water - an East German Virginia Woolf.' - Guardian 'One of the most prominent and controversial novelists of her generation.' - New York Review of Books

Leseprobe

‘Cassandra is fierce and feverish poetry that engages with the ancient stories while also charting its own path. Filled with passionate and startling insight into human nature.’ Madeline Miller, author of The Song of Achilles

‘Christa Wolf wrote books that crossed and overcame the divide of East and West, books that have lasted: the great, allegorical novels.’ Günter Grass

‘A sensitive writer of the purest water – an East German Virginia Woolf.’ Guardian

‘One of the most prominent and controversial novelists of her generation.’ New York Review of Books

Contents

Title PageTranslator’s NoteEpigraphCassandraConditions of a Narrative: CassandraBooks in English by Christa WolfAbout the AuthorCopyright

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

In 1980 East German author Christa Wolf took a trip to Greece accompanied by her husband, Gerhard. In 1982 she was awarded a guest lectureship at the University of Frankfurt, where in May she delivered a series of five ‘Lectures on Poetics’ relating to her Greek travels and studies. The fifth ‘lecture’ was a draft of the novel Cassandra, which she then revised and expanded for publication. The four introductory lectures were published separately in Germany under the title Conditions of a Narrative: Cassandra; The Frankfurt Lectures on Poetics (Voraussetzungen einer Erzählung: Kassandra). Conditions of a Narrative: Cassandra is included in this ebook edition of Cassandra.

Once again limb-loosing love shakes me, bitter-sweet, untamable, a dusky animal.

SAPPHO

IT WAS HERE. This is where she stood. These stone lions looked at her; now they no longer have heads. This fortress – once impregnable, now a pile of stones – was the last thing she saw. A long-forgotten enemy demolished it, so did the centuries, sun, rain, wind. The sky is still the same, a deep blue block, high, vast. Nearby, the giant fitted-stone walls which, today as in the past, point the way to the gate, where no trace of blood can be seen seeping out from beneath. Point the way into the darkness. Into the slaughterhouse. And alone.

Keeping step with the story, I make my way into death.

Here I end my days, helpless, and nothing, nothing I could have done or not done, willed or thought, could have led me to a different goal. Deeper than any other feeling, deeper even than my fear, this imbues, etches, poisons me: the indifference of the celestials to us of earth. Unavailing the venture to set our little warmth against their icy chill. Vain our attempt to evade their atrocities, long have I known that. But a couple of nights ago on the sea crossing, when storms threatened to smash our ship from every direction; when no one could hold on unless he was lashed down; when I found Marpessa secretly untying the knots which bound her and the twins to each other and to the mast, and being attached to a longer rope than the others, I threw myself at her unhesitatingly and unthinkingly to prevent her from abandoning the lives of her children and mine to the indifferent elements, so that I could surrender them to mad people instead; when, shrinking from her gaze, I crouched again in my place beside the whimpering, spewing Agamemnon – I could only marvel at the durable stuff of those cords that bind us to life. I saw that Marpessa, who, as once in the past, would not talk to me, was better prepared for what we are suffering now than I, the seeress; for I derived joy from everything I saw – joy, not hope! – and lived on in order to see.

Strange how every person’s weapons – Marpessa’s silence, Agamemnon’s blustering – must always remain unchanged. I, to be sure, have gradually put down my weapons; that was what proved possible for me in the way of change.

Why did I want the gift of prophecy, come what may?

To speak with my voice: the ultimate. I did not want anything more, anything different. If need be, I could prove that, but to whom? To the foreigners, impudent and reserved at the same time, who are standing around the chariot? Enough to make you laugh if anything still can: that my proneness to justify myself should have gone down only just before I did.

Marpessa does not speak. I will not see the children again. She is hiding them from me underneath her shawl.

The same sky over Mycenae as over Troy, only empty. Shiny like enamel, inaccessible, polished clean. Something in me matches the emptiness of the sky above the enemy land. So far, everything that has befallen me has struck an answering chord. This is the secret that encircles and holds me together; I have never been able to talk of it with anyone. Only here, at the uttermost rim of my life, can I name it to myself: there is something of everyone in me, so I have belonged completely to no one, and I have even understood their hatred for me. Once ‘in the past’ – yes, that’s the magic word – I tried to talk about it to Myrine, in hints and broken phrases. Not to obtain relief, there was no relief; but because I believed I owed it to her. Troy’s end was in sight, we were lost. Aeneas had pulled out with his people. Myrine despised him. And I tried to tell her – no, not just that I understood Aeneas; that I knew him. As if I were he. As if I were crouching inside him, feeding in thought on his traitorous resolves. ‘Traitorous,’ said Myrine, angrily raining axe blows on the undergrowth in the trench surrounding the citadel, not listening to me, perhaps not even understanding what I said, for since I was imprisoned in the basket I speak softly. It is not my voice that suffered, as they all thought. It is the tone. The tone of annunciation is gone. Happily gone.

Myrine shrieked. Strange that I, who am not yet old myself, must speak of almost everyone I knew in the past tense. Not of Aeneas, no. Aeneas is alive. But must a man who lives when all men die be a coward? Was it more than policy that moved him to retreat with the last men to Mount Ida, his native territory, rather than lead them to death? After all, a few of us must survive (Myrine denied that): who better than Aeneas and his people?

Why not me, along with him? The question was not asked. He, who tried to ask it, ended by taking it back. Just as I, alas, had to suppress what I could have said to him only now. In turn, I stayed alive long enough at least to think it. Will stay alive, for another few hours. I will not ask for the dagger which I know Marpessa is carrying on her. Which her eyes alone offered me a short time ago when we saw the wife, the queen. Which my eyes alone declined. Who knows me better than Marpessa? No one any more. It is past noon. What I grasp between now and evening will perish with me. Will it perish? Once a thought comes into the world, does it live on in someone else? Inside our trusty chariot driver, who finds us a nuisance?

‘She’s laughing,’ I hear the women say; they do not know that I speak their language. They draw from me shuddering; everywhere I get the same reaction. Myrine, seeing me smile as I talked of Aeneas, shrieked: unteachable, that’s what I was. I laid my hand on the nape of her neck until she was still, and from the wall beside the Scaean Gate both of us watched the sun sink into the sea. We knew it was the last time we would stand together this way.

I am testing for pain. I am probing my memory the way a doctor probes a limb to see whether it has atrophied. Perhaps pain dies before we die. That information, if true, must be passed on; but to whom? Of those here who speak my language, there is none who will not die with me. I make the pain test and think about the goodbyes. Each one was different. In the end we identified each other by whether or not we knew this was goodbye. Sometimes we just raised our hands lightly. Sometimes we embraced. Aeneas and I did not touch each other any more. It seems to me that his eyes, whose colour I could not fathom, were above me for an infinite time. Sometimes we continued to talk, the way I talked with Myrine, so that at last the name was named which we had kept silent so long: Penthesilea.

I talked of how I had seen her, Myrine, march through this gate three or four years before beside Penthesilea and her armoured band. Of my rush of irreconcilable feelings – amazement, compassion, admiration, horror, embarrassment, and yes, even an infamous amusement: how they found release in a laughing fit which distressed me and which Penthesilea was never able to pardon me for, hypersensitive as she was. Myrine confirmed the fact. Penthesilea was offended. This and nothing else was the reason for her coldness toward me. And I confessed to Myrine that my bids for reconciliation were half-hearted, even though I knew that Penthesilea was going to fall in battle. ‘How could you know that!’ Myrine asked me with a trace of her former violence; but I was no longer jealous of Penthesilea. The dead are not jealous of each other. ‘She fell in battle because she wanted to fall. Why else do you think she came to Troy? And I had reason to keep close watch on her, so I saw how it was.’ Myrine was silent. What had always enchanted me more than anything else about her was her hatred for my prophecies, which I never uttered in her presence, to be sure; but they were always reported to her promptly, including the passing mention of my certainty that I was going to be killed. She would not let me get away with that, unlike the others. Where did I get the right to make such pronouncements? I did not answer, closed my eyes in happiness. At last, after such a long time, my body again. Once again the hot stab through my insides. Once again the utter weakness for someone. How she tore into me. So I had not cared for Penthesilea, the man-killing warrior woman, eh? She asked. Well, did I think that she, Myrine, had killed fewer men than her commander in chief? When in fact she had most likely killed more, after Penthesilea’s death, in order to avenge her?

Yes, my pony, but that was something else again.

That was your clenched defiance and your blazing grief for Penthesilea, don’t you think I understood that? Then there was her deep shrinking shyness, her fear of being touched, which I never infringed until the moment when I was allowed to wind her blonde mane around my hand and so found out how very much I had felt like doing that for so long. Your smile in the moment of my death, I thought; and because I no longer abstained from any caress, I left the terror behind for a long time. Now it approaches me darkly once again.

Myrine got into my blood the moment I saw her, bright, daring, ardent beside the dark, self-consuming Penthesilea. Joy-giver or pain-giver, I could not let her go; but I do not wish she was beside me now. I rejoiced to see her, a woman, put on her weapons – she was the only one to do so – when the men of Troy brought the Greeks’ horse into the city against my objections. I strengthened her resolve to keep watch beside the monster while I stayed with her, unarmed. I rejoiced, perversely again, to see her hurl herself at the first Greek to come up out of the wooden steed around midnight. Rejoiced – yes, rejoiced! – to see her fall and die from a single blow. Because I was laughing they spared me as the lives of madmen are spared.

I had not yet seen enough.

I do not want to speak any more. All the vanities and habits have been gutted; the places inside me where they could have grown back are laid waste. I feel no more sorry for myself than for others. I no longer want to prove anything. The laughter of this queen when Agamemnon stepped onto the red carpet went beyond all proof.

Who will find a voice again, and when?

It will be one whose skull is split by a pain. And until then, until his coming, nothing will be heard but bellows and commands and whimpers and the ‘yes, sirs’ of those who obey. The helplessness of the victors who silently prowl around the vehicle, passing each other my name. Old men, women, children. Their helplessness at the atrocity of the victory. At its aftermath, which I can already see in their blind eyes. Stricken blind indeed. Everything they have to know will unfold right before their eyes, and they will see nothing. That is just how it is.

Now I can put to use a skill I have practised all my life: to conquer my feelings by thought. In the past it was love I had to conquer; now fear. It assailed me when the chariot, dragged slowly up the mountain by weary horses, came to a stop between the sombre walls. Outside this final gate. When the sky opened and sunlight fell on the stone lions, which looked away past me and everything, and always will look away. Of course I know what fear is, but this is something different. Perhaps it is cropping up in me for the first time only to be killed again at once. Now the inner core is being razed.

My curiosity – about myself as well as about others – is fully at liberty now. When I recognised this I shrieked out loud. It was during the crossing; I was wretched like all the others, buffeted by the heavy sea, drenched to the skin by the spurting foam, disturbed by the wailing and exhalations of the other Trojan women, who were not kindly disposed toward me: for everyone always knew who I was. I was never permitted to lose myself in their midst. I wished for that too late; I did too much in my past life to make myself known. Self-reproaches, too, prevent the important questions from coming together. Now the question grew like fruit inside the peel, and when it detached itself and lay before me, I shrieked aloud, with pain or bliss.

Why did I want the gift of prophecy, come what may?

As it happened, on that stormy night King Agamemnon the ‘Most Resolute’ (ye gods!) grabbed me out of the tangle of other bodies; my cry coincided with this moment and required no further explanation. I, I was the one who had stirred up Poseidon against him, he shrieked at me, out of his head with fear; for had he not sacrificed three of his best horses to the god before the crossing? ‘And Athena?’ I asked coldly. ‘What did you sacrifice to her?’ I saw him turn pale. All men are self-centred children. (What about Aeneas? Nonsense. Aeneas is an adult.) What, mockery, in the eyes of a woman? They cannot stand that. The victorious king would have killed me – that is what I wanted him to do – if he had not still been afraid of me as well. The man has always taken me for a witch. He wanted me to pacify Poseidon! He thrust me to the bow, jerked my arms up in the posture he considered suitable for an incantation. I moved my lips. You poor wretch, what does it matter to you whether you drown here or are murdered at home?

If Clytemnestra was the woman I thought she was, she could not share the throne with this nonentity. She is the woman I thought she was. Besides that, she is racked with hatred. Most likely the weakling treated her vilely while he still controlled her, the way they all do. I not only know men but women as well, which is more difficult; and so I know that the queen cannot spare my life. A short time ago her glances told me so.

When did my hatred disappear? Oh yes, it is gone, my plump juicy hate. I know one name that could awaken it, but I prefer to leave that name unthought as yet. If only I could. If only I could wipe out the name, not merely from my memory, but from the memory of all men living. If I could burn it out of our heads – I would not have lived in vain. Achilles.

If only my mother had not come to mind just now, Hecuba, aboard another ship headed toward other shores with Odysseus. Who can help the thoughts that come into his head? Her crazed face as they dragged her away. Her mouth. My mother called down on the Greeks the most hideous curse ever uttered in human history. It will come true, one must only know how to wait. I called out to her that her curse would be fulfilled. Her last word was my name, a scream of triumph. When I stepped into the ship, everything in me was dumb.

That night the storm abated soon after I ‘charmed’ it. Not only my fellow captives, but also the Greeks – even the crude, avid oarsmen – drew back from me, shy and deferential. I told Agamemnon I would lose my power if he forced me into his bed. He let me go. His potency was already long gone; the girl who lived with him in his tent for the last year betrayed it to me. He had threatened that if she did this – betrayed his unutterable secret – he would find a pretext to have her stoned to death by his troops. Suddenly I understood his exquisite cruelty in battle, just as I understood why his silence deepened the farther we got from Nauplion along the long, dusty road through the plains of Argos, and the closer we came to his citadel: Mycenae. The closer we came to his wife, to whom he had never given a reason to be merciful if he showed any weakness. Who knows what misery she may spare him if she murders him.

They do not know how to live; this is the real disaster, the truly fatal danger – I came to understand that only little by little. I, the seeress! Priam’s daughter. How long I was blind to the obvious: that I had to choose between my birth and my office. How long I feared the dread I must arouse in my people if I were to perform that office, come what may. The same dread that has now hurried ahead of me over the sea. The people here – naïve if I compare them with the Trojans, for they have not experienced war – are exhibiting their feelings, fingering the chariot, the foreign objects, the plundered weapons, even the horses. Not me. The chariot driver, who seems ashamed of his countrymen, told them my name. I saw the same thing I am used to seeing: their dread. ‘They are not the best people, of course,’ says the chariot driver. ‘They stayed at home.’ The women approach again. They appraise me unabashed, peer under the shawl I have drawn over my head and shoulders. They bicker about whether I am beautiful; the older ones claim I am, the younger say no.

Beautiful? I, the terrible one. I who wanted Troy to fall.

Rumour, which overruns the seas, will also precede me into time. Panthous the Greek will turn out to be right. ‘But you are lying, my dear,’ he said to me while we performed the prescribed passes at the shrine of Apollo, readying the ceremony. ‘You are lying when you prophesy we are all doomed. Prophesying our destruction, you immortalise yourself. You need that more than you need a snug life in the present. Your name will go on. And you know it.’

I could not slap his face yet a second time. Panthous was jealous, spiteful, and sharp-tongued. But was he right? In any case, he made me think the unheard-of: the world could go on after our destruction. I did not let him see how that unnerved me. Why had I allowed myself to suppose that the human race would be wiped out along with us? Did I not know how the female slaves from the conquered tribe were always forced to increase the fertility of the victors? Was it the overweening pride of a king’s daughter that made me implicate all the Trojan women – not to mention the men – in the death of our house? It took me a long time and much labour to distinguish between qualities in ourselves that we know and those that are inborn and virtually unrecognisable. Affable, modest, unassuming – that was the image I had of myself, which survived every catastrophe virtually intact. Not only that: whenever it survived, the catastrophe lay behind me. Did I gravely wound the self-esteem of my family in order to preserve my own – because to be honest, proud, and truth-loving was a part of this image? Did I pay them back for injuries they had inflicted on me by the inflexible way I spoke the truth? I believe that this is what Panthous the Greek thought about me. It took me a long time to notice, but he knew and detested himself, and sought relief by attributing one cause and one alone to every act or omission: self-love. He was absolutely convinced of a world order in which it was impossible to serve oneself and others at the same time. Never, never was there a breach in his aloneness. But he had no right – I know that today – to regard me as like himself. At first perhaps he was right to think me like him, on one score – what Marpessa called my pride. I lived on to experience the happiness of becoming myself and being more useful to others because of it. I do know that only a few people notice when someone changes. Hecuba, my mother, knew me when I was young and ceased to concern herself with me. ‘This child does not need me,’ she said. I admired and hated her for it. Priam, my father, needed me.

When I turn around I see Marpessa smiling. Now that things have taken a grave turn, I hardly see her without a smile. ‘Marpessa, the children will not be allowed to live; they’re mine. You will, I think.’ ‘I know,’ she says. She does not say whether she wants to live or not. They will have to drag the children away from her. Perhaps they will have to break her arms. Not because they are mine, but because they are children. ‘I’ll be the first to go, Marpessa. Right after the king.’ Marpessa answers: ‘I know.’ ‘Your pride, Marpessa, overshadows even mine.’ And she, smiling, replies: ‘That’s how it must be, mistress.’

How many years it has been since she called me mistress. Where she led me I was not mistress, not priestess. That I was allowed that experience makes dying easier for me. Easier? Do I know what I am saying?

I will never know whether this woman whose love I courted loved me. At first it may be that I did it from coquetry: in the past something in me wanted to please. Later I did it because I wanted to know her. She served me to the point of self-abandon, and so she must have needed to exercise reserve.

When the fear ebbs away, as it is doing just now, remote thoughts come to mind. Why did the prisoners from Mycenae describe their Lion Gate as even more gigantic than it looks to me? Why did they portray the cyclopean walls as more immense than they are, their people as more violent and avid for vengeance? They talked gladly and extravagantly about their home, like all captives. Not one ever asked me why I was gathering such exact intelligence about the enemy land. And why, in fact, did I do so, at a time when even to me it seemed certain that we were winning? We were supposed to smite the enemy, not to know him! What impelled me to know him, when I could reveal to no one my shocking discovery: they are like us!? Was I trying to find out where I was going to die? Was I thinking about dying? Wasn’t I swollen with triumph like all of us?

How quickly and completely we forget.

War gives its people their shape. I do not want to remember them that way, as they were made and shattered by war. I gave a crack on the mouth to that minstrel who went on singing the glory of Priam until the end: the undignified, flattering wretch. No. I will not forget my confused, wayward father. But neither will I forget the father I loved more than anyone else when I was a child. Who was not too particular about reality. Who could live in fantasy worlds. Who did not have clearly in view the contingencies that maintained his nation, or those that threatened him. This made him less than the ideal king, but he was the husband of the ideal queen; that gave him special privileges. I can still see him: night after night he used to go in to my often-pregnant mother, who sat in her megaron, in her wooden armchair, which closely resembled a throne, where the king, smiling amiably, drew up a stool. This is the earliest picture I remember, for I, Father’s favourite and interested in politics like none of my numerous siblings, was allowed to sit with them and listen to what they were saying; often seated in Priam’s lap, my hand in the crook of his shoulder (the place I love best on Aeneas), which was very vulnerable and where I myself saw the Greek spear run him through. It was I, who forever afterward confused with the ascetic, clean odour of my father the names of foreign princes, kings, and cities; the goods we traded or transported through the Hellespont on our famous ships; the figures of our income and the debates about their expenditure. (Now those princes are fallen, the cities impoverished or destroyed, the goods spoiled or plundered.) It was I, I of all his children my father believed, who betrayed our city and betrayed him.

Nothing left to describe the world but the language of the past. The language of the present has shrivelled to the words that describe this dismal fortress. The language of the future has only one sentence left for me: Today I will be killed.

What does the man want? Is he speaking to me? ‘I must be hungry,’ he says. Not I, he is the one who is hungry; he wants to stable the horses and go home at last, to his family, who surround him impatiently. I am to follow his queen, he says. Quietly enter the fortress with the two guards, who are attending me for my protection, not to keep watch on me. I will have to terrify him. ‘Yes,’ I say to him, ‘I am going. Only not now, not yet. Leave me here a little while yet. The reason is, you know,’ (I say to him, trying to spare him) ‘When I enter this gate I am as good as dead.’

The same old story: not the crime but its heralding turns men pale and furious. I know that from my own example. Know that we would rather punish the one who names the deed than the one who commits it. In this respect, as in everything else, we are all alike. The difference lies in whether we know it.

It was hard for me to learn that, because I was accustomed to being the exception and did not want to be lumped under the same roof with everyone else. That is why I struck Panthous on the evening of the day he consecrated me as a priestess; when he said to me: ‘Tough luck for you, little Cassandra, that you are your father’s favourite daughter. You know that Polyxena would make a more suitable priestess. She prepared herself, whereas you are relying on his support. And, it seems’ – I thought his smile impudent when he said that – ‘you are also relying on your dreams.’

I slapped his face for that. He gave me a penetrating look, but all he said was: ‘And now you are relying on the fact that although I am the chief priest, I am, after all, only a Greek.’

What he said was true, but not completely, for less than he could imagine was I guided by self-interest. (Yes, I know, unbeknown to us even our self-interest is guided by something!) The dream of the night before came unsummoned, and it troubled me deeply. It was Apollo who came to me, I saw that at once despite his distant resemblance to Panthous; although I could hardly have said wherein the resemblance consisted. Most likely in the expression of his eyes, which I called ‘cruel’ then but merely ‘clear-headed’ later on; referring to Panthous, for I never saw Apollo again! I saw Apollo bathed in radiant light the way Panthous taught me to see him. The sun god with his lyre, his blue although cruel eyes, his bronzed skin. Apollo, the god of the seers. Who knew what I ardently desired: the gift of prophecy, and conferred it on me with a casual gesture which I did not dare to feel was disappointing; whereupon he approached me as a man. I believed it was only due to my awful terror that he transformed himself into a wolf surrounded by mice and spat furiously into my mouth when he was unable to overpower me. So that when I awoke in horror I had an unspeakably loathsome taste on my tongue, and in the middle of the night I fled out of the temple precinct, where I was required to sleep at that time, into the citadel, into the palace, into the room, into my mother’s bed. For me it was a precious moment when Hecuba’s face twisted with concern for me; but she had herself under control. ‘A wolf?’ she asked coolly. ‘Why a wolf? How did you come to think of that? And where did you get the mice from? Who told you that?’

Apollo Lykeios. The voice of Parthena, the wet-nurse. The god of the wolves and the mice: she knew dark stories about him which she whispered to me and which I was not supposed to repeat to anyone. I would never have thought that this ambivalent god could be identical to our unimpeachable Apollo in the temple. Only Marpessa, Parthena’s daughter and the same age I was, knew about the stories and kept silent as I did. My mother did not insist that I name names, for she was less troubled by the wolf shape of the sun god than by my fear to unite with him.

It was an honour for a mortal woman if a god wanted to lie with her, was it not? Yes, it was. And the fact that the god I had appointed myself to serve wanted to possess me completely: wasn’t that natural? Yes of course. So, what was wrong? I should never, never have told Hecuba this dream! She would not leave off asking me prying questions.

Had I not sat one year before with the other girls in the temple grounds of Athena just after I bled for the first time – hadn’t I been forced to sit there? I thought as I had thought at the time, and the skin of my scalp crawled with dreadful shame just as it had done a year before – and hadn’t everything followed its predetermined course? Even now I could point out the cypress tree under which I sat, provided that the Greeks have not set fire to it; I could describe the shape of the loose row of clouds from the Hellespont. ‘Loose row.’ Absurd, ridiculous words: I cannot waste any more time on them. I will simply think of the scent of olives and tamarisks. Close my eyes, I can’t go on; but I could. I opened them a crack and let in the legs of men. Dozens of men’s legs clad in sandals; you would not believe how different they all were, and all repulsive. In a single day I had enough of men’s legs to last me a lifetime; no one suspected. I felt their looks on my face, on my breast. Not once did I look around at the other girls, they did not look at me. We had nothing to do with each other; it was up to the men to select and deflower us. For a long time before I went to sleep I heard the snapping of fingers and the single phrase uttered with so many different intonations: ‘Come on.’ All around me the emptiness grew. One by one the other girls had been taken away: the daughters of the officers, the palace scribes, the potters, the craftsmen, the charioteers, and the tenant farmers. I had known emptiness since my earliest childhood. I experienced two kinds of shame: that of being elect and that of being left on the shelf. Yes, I would become a priestess at any cost.

At noon, when Aeneas came, it struck me that for a long time now I had picked out his figure from every crowd. He came straight over to me. ‘Forgive me,’ he said, ‘I could not come before now.’ As if we had had an appointment. He lifted me up – no, I got up myself; but we disagreed about that now and again. We went into a remote corner of the temple precinct and, without noticing it, crossed over the boundary beyond which one may not speak. It was not due to pride that I never said a word to the women about Aeneas when we gradually came to speak about our feelings; and not only due to shyness, although of course that played a part. I always held back; I never showed my inner self as other women did. I know that because of this I never broke down the barrier between us completely. The unspoken name of Aeneas stood between me and the women, who as the war dragged on came to fear their increasingly savage menfolk as much as the enemy, and who could not know whose side I was really on if I would tell them no details: no details, for example, about that afternoon at the boundary of the temple precinct when we two, Aeneas and I, both knew what was expected of us; for we had both been instructed by my mother, Hecuba. That afternoon, when neither of us felt capable of living up to these expectations. When each of us felt to blame for our failure. My nurse and my mother and Herophile the priestess had impressed on me the duties of consummation, but they had not reckoned on the fact that the sudden intervention of love can obstruct these duties; so not knowing which way to turn, I burst into tears at his uncertainty, even though his uncertainty could only be due to my awkwardness. We were young, young. As he kissed, stroked, and touched me, I would have done whatever he wanted; but he seemed to want nothing. He asked me to forgive him for something, but I did not understand what. Toward evening I fell asleep. I still remember dreaming about a ship that carried Aeneas away from our coast across calm blue water, and about a huge fire which interposed itself between the voyagers and us, who stayed behind, as the ship moved away toward the horizon. The sea was burning. I can still see this dream-image today, no matter how many grimmer pictures of reality have veiled it since. I would like to know – what am I thinking! Like to know? I? But yes, the words are true – I would like to know what unrest, unremarked by me, already caused such dreams amid peace, amid happiness: for believe it or not, we used to talk of happiness and peace!

I woke up screaming. Aeneas, stirred awake, could not quiet me and carried me to my mother. Not until later, not until I felt compelled to examine these events day and night until they gradually lost their keen edge, did I wonder at how my mother asked him whether everything had gone all right, and how he, Aeneas, curtly answered ‘Yes.’ And how Hecuba thereupon thanked him. That was the strangest part of all, and humiliating, although I did not know why. And she sent him away. Put me to bed like a child after administering a potion which made me feel good and dissolved all questions and all dreams.

It is hard to put into words what signs tell us infallibly when we must not reflect further about an event. Aeneas vanished from my view, the first instance of what became a pattern. Aeneas remained a glowing point inside me; his name a sharp stab that I inflicted on myself as often as I could. But I would not allow myself to understand the enigmatic sentence of Parthena, my nurse, when she took leave of me – for now I was an adult – and gave me her daughter Marpessa as a maidservant. In a tone half respectful, half hate-filled, she murmured to herself: ‘So the old lady has gotten her way again even if this time, maybe, it’s for her little daughter’s good.’ And then she, too, asked me if everything had gone all right. And I told her my dream as I had always done. For the first time I saw a human being turn pale at my words. (What did that really feel like? Frightening? Exciting? Did it give me an appetite for more? Later on, they accused me of needing to see people turn pale. Is that true?)

‘Cybele, help!’ whispered Parthena, my nurse. These were the same words she spoke when she died – shortly after the destruction of Troy and before the sea crossing, I believe. Yes, when all we captives were rounded up on the naked shore in the terrible storms of autumn, the quaking storms at the end of the world. ‘Cybele, help!’ moaned the old woman. But it was her daughter Marpessa who helped her, giving her a potion which put Parthena to sleep, never more to awaken.

Who was Cybele?

The nurse recoiled. I could see that she was forbidden to speak that name. She knew, and I knew too, that Hecuba must be obeyed. Today it seems to me incredible how her orders affected me; I can hardly remember that I once rebelled against them in high dudgeon. All she had ever wanted was to protect me, she told me afterward. But she had underestimated me, she said. By that time I had seen Cybele.

No matter how often I walked that way in later years, alone and with the other women, I have never forgotten how I felt when Marpessa led me to Mount Ida one evening at twilight – I had always had the mountain in full view, secretly loved it as my own, walked there countless times, thought I knew it – and how Marpessa, leading the way, dived into a shrub-covered fold in the ground. How she crossed through a small grove of fig trees on paths where only goats clambered, and how we suddenly stood surrounded by young oak trees, before the sanctuary of the unknown goddess where a band of brown-skinned, slender-limbed women danced in homage. Among them I saw slave women from the palace, women from the settlements beyond the walls of the citadel, and also Parthena the nurse, who crouched outside the cave entrance, under the willow tree whose roots dangled into the opening of the cave like the pubic hair of a woman: she seemed to be directing the train of dancers with movements of her massive body. Marpessa slid into the circle, which did not even notice my arrival – a new and actually painful experience for me. They gradually increased their tempo, intensified their rhythm, moved faster, more demandingly, more turbulently; hurled individual dancers out of the circle, among them Marpessa, my reserved Marpessa!; drove them to gestures which offended my modesty; until, beside themselves, they shook, went into howling contortions, sank into an ecstasy in which they saw things invisible to the rest of us, and finally one after another sagged and collapsed in exhaustion. Marpessa was one of the last.

I fled in awe and terror, wandered around for a long time, came home late at night, found my bed ready, a meal prepared, Marpessa waiting beside the bed. And next morning in the palace, the same unruffled faces as always.

What was happening? What kind of place did I live in? How many realities were there in Troy besides mine, which I had thought was the only one? Who fixed the boundary between visible and invisible? And who allowed the ground to be shaken where I had walked so securely? ‘I know who Cybele is!’ I shrieked at my mother. ‘So,’ said Hecuba. ‘That’s fine, then.’ No questions about who had taken me there. No investigation. No punishment. Did my mother show a trace of relief, even weakness? What was that to me, a mother who showed weakness? Did she perhaps intend to confide her worries to me? Then I withdrew. Evaded the touch of real people as I would do for a long time to come. Needed and demanded to be unapproachable. Became a priestess. Yes. She got to know me sooner than I did her, after all.

‘The queen,’ my father said to me in one of our intimate hours, ‘Hecuba dominates only those who can be dominated. She loves the indomitable ones.’ All at once I saw my father in a different light. Surely Hecuba must love him? No doubt of it. Did that mean he was indomitable? Ah. Once upon a time our parents were young, too. As the war went on, baring everyone’s entrails, the picture changed. Priam became increasingly unapproachable and obstinate, yet controllable all the same; only it was no longer Hecuba who could control him. Hecuba grew softer, yet could not be swayed. Grief for his sons killed Priam before he was pierced by the enemy spear. Hecuba, forced open by pain, grew more compassionate and more alive with each year of woe.

Like me. Never was I more alive than now, in the hour of my death.

What do I mean by alive? What I mean by alive – not to shrink from what is most difficult: to change one’s image of oneself. ‘Words,’ said Panthous in the days when he was still my fencing partner. ‘Nothing but words, Cassandra. A human being changes nothing, so why himself of all things, why of all things his image of himself?’

If I grope my way back along the thread of my life, which is rolled up inside me – I skip over the war, a black block; slowly, longingly backtrack to the pre-war years; the time as a priestess, a white block; farther back: the girl – here I am caught by the very word ‘girl,’ and caught all the more by her form. By the beautiful image. I have always been caught by images more than by words. Probably that is strange, and incompatible with my vocation; but I can no longer pursue my vocation. The last thing in my life will be a picture, not a word. Words die before pictures.

Mortal fear.

What will it be like? Will I be overcome by weakness? Will my body take control of my thinking? Will the mortal fear simply reoccupy, with a powerful thrust, all the positions I have wrested from my ignorance, my comfortableness, my pride, my cowardice, laziness, shame? Will it successfully sweep away even the resolution I sought and formulated on the way here: that I will not lose consciousness until the end?

When our ships – how stupid! I mean their ships – moored in the bay of Nauplion during a calm while the water was smooth as glass and the sun, plump and gorged with blood, was sinking behind the chain of mountains; when my Trojan women sought consolation in inconsolable weeping, as if they had become truly captives only now, when they set foot in the foreign land; in the days following, on the dusty, hot, arduous path through the stronghold of Tiryns and the filthy market towns of Argos, met and accompanied by the abuse of the women and old men who gathered; but especially on the last stretch climbing up through dry land toward this terrible stone pile, the fortress of Mycenae, our destination, which loomed overhead, sinister but still remote; when even Marpessa moaned aloud; when the king himself, irresolute Agamemnon, instead of urging haste as one would have expected, ordered one rest stop after another and each time sat down silently beside me in the shade of an olive (olive, tenderest tree …), where he drank and offered me wine in a way that offended no one in his retinue; when my heart, which I had stopped feeling long ago, grew smaller, firmer, harder with each rest stop, a smarting stone from which I could not wring another drop of moisture: then my resolution was formed, smelted, tempered, forged, and cast like a spear. I will continue a witness even if there is no longer one single human being left to demand my testimony.

I did not want to give myself the chance to ponder this resolution again. But isn’t it the kind of remedy that causes a worse ill than it is meant to combat? Has not this tried and tested remedy already brought about a renewal of my old, forgotten malady: inner division, so that I watch myself, see myself sitting in this accursed Greek chariot trembling with fear beneath my shawl? Will I split myself in two until the end before the axe splits me, for the sake of consciousness? In order not to writhe with fear, not to bellow like an animal – and who should know better than I how animals bellow when they are sacrificed! Will I, until the end, until that axe – will I still, when my head, my neck, is already – will I—?

Why do I simply refuse to allow myself this relapse into creatureliness? What is holding me back? Who is there left to see me? Do I, the unbeliever, still see myself as the focus of a god’s gazes, as I did when a child, a girl, a priestess? Will that never pass?

Wherever I look or cast my thoughts, there is no god, no judgment, only myself. Who is it that makes my self-judgment so severe, into death and beyond?

What if that, too, is prescribed? What if that, too, is worked by strings that are out of my hands, like the movements of the girl I was, ideal image, image of longing: the bright young figure in the clear landscape, gay, candid, hopeful, trusting herself and others, deserving what they conferred on her, free; oh, free? In reality: captive. Steered, guided, and driven to the goal others set. How humiliating (a word from the old days). They all knew. Panthous too. Panthous the Greek was in on the secret. He did not twitch an eyelash as he handed over the staff and the fillet to the candidate designated by Hecuba. So he did not believe that I had dreamed of Apollo? But of course he did. ‘Of course, of course, little Cassandra.’ The awkward thing was, he did not believe in dreams.

On the day when I announced calmly, ‘Troy will fall,’ he cried, ‘At last!’ because I did not cite a dream as proof. He shared in my knowledge, but he did not care. He, the Greek, was not anxious for Troy, only for his own life, which he felt had lasted long enough anyhow (so he said). For a long time he had been carrying around the device to end it. But he did not use it. Died in torment in order to live one day longer. Panthous. It seems we never really knew him.

Of course Parthena, my nurse, knew what was going on behind the scenes, too. Knew how I was chosen priestess. Marpessa knew it through her. But it was she (how long it has been since I thought of that) who handed me the key to my dream and my life. ‘If Apollo spits into your mouth,’ she told me solemnly, ‘that means you have the gift to predict the future. But no one will believe you.’

The gift of prophecy. So that was it. A hot terror. I had dreamed of it. Believe me, not believe me – they would see. After all, in the long run it was impossible for people not to believe a person who proves she is right.

I had even won over Hecuba, my sceptical mother. Now she recalled a story about my early childhood; Parthena, my nurse, was made to spread it around; by no means were dreams our only clue. On our second birthday my twin brother, Helenus, and I fell asleep in the sacred grove of the Thymbraian Apollo, left alone by our parents, poorly tended by our nurse, who had fallen asleep, no doubt a little dazed from the heavy sweet wine. When Hecuba came to look for us, she saw to her horror that the sacred serpents of the temple had approached us and were licking at our ears. She drove away the serpents with vigorous handclapping, at the same time waking the nurse and the children. But ever since then she had known: the god had given these two children of hers the gift of prophecy. ‘Is it really true?’ people asked, and the more often Parthena the nurse told the story, the more firmly she believed it. I still remember that Hecuba’s zeal left a flat taste in my mouth; I felt that she was going a little too far. But all the same she confirmed what I dearly wanted to believe: I, Cassandra, and none other of the twelve daughters of Priam and Hecuba, had been appointed prophetess by the god himself. What was more natural than that I should also serve him as a priestess at his shrine?

Polyxena … I built my career at your expense; you were no worse than I, no less suited to the post. I wanted to tell you that before they dragged you away to be a sacrificial victim, as they are doing to me now. Polyxena, even if we had exchanged lives, our deaths would have been the same. Is that a consolation? Did you need consolation? Do I need it? You looked at me (did you still see me?). I said nothing. They dragged you away, to the grave of depraved Achilles. Achilles the brute.

Oh, if only these humans did not know love.

Oh, if only I had strangled him with my own hands on that first day of the war – may his name be accursed and forgotten – instead of looking on while he, Achilles, strangled my brother Troilus. Remorse eats away at me, it will not ease, Polyxena. Panthous the Greek held me back. ‘They’re too much for you,’ he said. ‘I know them.’ He knew them. And me. I would not strangle any man. Polyxena, let me enjoy my belated confessions – I fell to him, had already fallen to him when it was not yet decided which of us he would dedicate priestess: you or me. Never, my dear one, did we speak of it. Everything was said in glances, half-spoken phrases. How could I have said to you what I was scarcely able to think: ‘Let me have the office of priestess; you do not need it.’ That is what I thought, I swear to you. I did not see that you needed it just as I did, only for the opposite reason. You had your lovers, that is what I thought. I was alone. After all, I used to run into them at daybreak coming out of your bedchamber. After all, I could not help seeing how beautiful you were, how you were growing more beautiful, you with your curly dark-blonde hair – the only one of Hecuba’s daughters whose hair was not black. Whoever could have been your father? wondered the nurses and the palace servants. No – you had no hope of becoming Priam’s favourite daughter. You did not envy me that post; that infuriated me. I was not in a position to wonder why you wanted to be priestess. To wonder whether you might not possibly want something quite different from the office than I did. Not dignity, distance, and a substitute for pleasures that were denied me, but rather, protection from yourself, from the multitude of your lovers, from the fate already prepared for you. You with your grey eyes. You with your narrow head, the white oval of your face, your hairline sharp as if it were cut with a knife. With that torrent of hair which every man had to dip his hands into. You with whom no man who saw you could help but fall in love. What do I mean, fall in love! Fall prey. And not only every man, many women, too. Marpessa among them I believe, when she came out of exile and never looked at a man again. Even ‘fall prey’ is too feeble a term for the frenzy of love, the madness, that gripped many a man, including Achilles the brute – and without your doing anything to cause it, that one must concede … Polyxena. Yes, it is quite possible that I was mistaken in the dark corridor at night; for if the shadow I saw creeping out your door was Aeneas’s shadow, why should you, whose every action was performed openly, have sworn to me much later that Aeneas had never, never been with you? But how silly I was. How could it have been Aeneas, coming from one woman only to clutch at another’s breast, and then run away!

Ah, Polyxena. The way you used to move. Brisk and impetuous, at the same time graceful. The way a priestess is not supposed to move. ‘Why ever not!’ said Panthous, and he flaunted his knowledge (of deeper authority than mine) of the nature of his god Apollo, whom after all he had served at the god’s central shrine in Delphi on the Greek mainland. ‘Why not be graceful, little Cassandra? Apollo is also the god of the Muses, is he not?’ He knew how to insult me, that Greek. He managed to convey that he regarded as barbaric the crude profile which we peoples of Asia Minor gave his god.

Which did not mean that he considered me an unsuitable priestess. Beyond doubt, he said, certain of my character traits cut me out for the priesthood. Which traits? Well, my desire to exercise influence over people; how else could a woman hold a position of power? Second: my ardent desire to be on familiar terms with the deity. And of course my aversion to the approaches of mortal men.

Panthous the Greek behaved as if he was unaware of the wound in my heart; as if he did not care that he was instilling in this heart a very subtle, very secret animosity toward him, the Chief Priest, of which I myself was scarcely conscious. After all, he was the one who taught me my Greek. And taught me the art of receiving a man, too. One night when I, the newly dedicated priestess, had to keep vigil by the god’s image, he came to me. Skilfully, almost without hurting me and almost tenderly, he did what Aeneas (I thought of him) had been unwilling or unable to do. It seemed not to surprise him that I was untouched, or that I had such a great fear of physical pain. He never mentioned a word about that night to anyone, not even me. But I was at a loss as to how I could harbour hatred and gratitude toward one and the same man.

I have a pale memory of that time; I felt nothing. For a whole year Polyxena did not speak to me. Priam was preparing for war. I held aloof. I played the priestess. I thought, to be grown up consists in this game: to lose oneself. I did not permit disappointment. I did not allow myself the slightest mistake when I led the procession of maidens to the statue of the god. As I had expected, I was trained to lead the chorus; I succeeded at everything. At first I feared I would be punished when a wolf or even a troop of mice appeared to me during prayers instead of the radiant form of the god with the lyre; but soon I found that absolutely nothing happened if I abandoned myself pleasurably to my apparitions. When Panthous came to me too, I had to envision the other man, Aeneas, in order to convert my disgust to pleasure. Upheld by the respect of the Trojans, I lived in semblance more than ever. I still remember how my life drained out of me. I can’t do it, I often thought as I sat on the city wall staring into space without seeing; but I could not bring myself to wonder what it was that placed me under such strain when my existence was so easy.

I saw nothing. Overtaxed by the gift of sight, I was blind. I saw only what was there, next to nothing. The course of the god’s year and the demands of the palace determined my life. You could also say they weighed it down. I did not know it could be different. I lived between events which ostensibly comprised the history of the royal house. Events that aroused the craving for more and more new events, and finally for war.

I believe that was the first thing I really saw.

Rumours about the SECOND SHIP were slow to reach me. My heart bitter with renunciation, I had moved away from the great circle of my brothers and sisters, their friends and young slaves, who used to mock and criticise, whisper or loudly discuss, in the evening, the resolves the assembly reached during the day. I was not forbidden to continue my old indolent life on my free evenings, to sit around under the trees and shrubs in the inner courtyards of the citadel, to give myself to the familiar and well-loved sounds of water rippling through earthenware pipes, to surrender to the hour in which the sky grows yellow and the houses radiate outward the daylight they have absorbed; to let wash over me the never-changing murmur, whispers, and prattle of my brothers and sisters, of the teachers, nurses, and domestic slaves. I forbade it to myself after I became a priestess. After I was convinced that Polyxena had blackened my character to my brothers and sisters (which she did not so much as dream of doing, she told me later, and I could not help but believe her). After I was convinced that my idle brothers and sisters, some of whom liked gossip and family discord, had run me down to their hearts’ content. I wanted to be privileged above them all, but I could not bear to have them envy me.

All this, the Troy of my childhood, no longer exists except inside my head. I will rebuild it there while I still have time, I will not forget a single stone, a single incidence of light, a single laugh, a single cry. It shall be kept faithfully inside me, however short the time may be. Now I have learned to see what is not, how hard the lesson was.