Cassandra

It was for his sake, whom I hated, and for the sake of my father, whom I loved, that I had avoided screaming their state secret out loud. There was a grain of calculation in my self-renunciation. Eumelos saw through me. My father did not.

It was one of those dreams which I realised at once was significant, which I did not understand immediately but did not forget. I was walking alone through a strange city; it was not Troy, but Troy was the only city I had ever seen before. My dream city was larger, more extensive. I knew it was night, yet the moon and the sun were in the sky at the same time and were struggling for dominance. I had been appointed judge (by whom it was not stated): which of the two heavenly bodies could shine more brightly? There was something wrong about this contest, but try as I might, I could not find out what. Until finally, disheartened and anxious, I said that of course everyone knew and could see that it was the sun that shone most brightly. ‘Phoebus Apollo!’ a voice cried in triumph

I lay awake, tortured myself wondering whether he equated me with Herophile, the stubborn old high priestess. For my benefit – and his – I compiled the differences. To my amazement I found there was not much to choose between us for anyone looking on from the outside. The difference I took such pride in amounted to nothing more than my inner reservations. This was not enough to satisfy him, Aeneas. Was it enough for me?

It was always like that when he and I breathed the same air; life flowed back into the husk of my body. When I stood on the wall at evening I saw the sun again, the moon and stars; the olive trees flashing silver in the wind; the purple, metallic sheen of the sea at sunset; the shifting brown and blue tones of the plain. The fragrance of the thyme fields wafted over to me; I felt how soft the air was. Aeneas was alive. I did not have to see him, I could wait until he came to me.

Then I understood: in the Helen we had invented, we were defending everything that we no longer had. And the more it faded, the more real we had to say it was.

So that alongside the river of heroic songs this tiny rivulet, too, may reach those faraway, perhaps happier people who will live in times to come.’

I wanted to test him. ‘We could give Helen back to Menelaus,’ I said. Again he smiled his painful smile: ‘Could you really?’

Marpessa is singing a song to the twins. She learned it, as I did, from her mother, Parthena the nurse. It says: ‘When the child is sleeping, his soul, a beautiful bird, flies to the silver olive and then slowly mounts toward the setting sun.’ Soul, beautiful bird. I felt its movements in my breast, sometimes light as a feather’s touch, sometimes violent and painful.

the love rushed out with a river of tears.

When we saw each other for the last time, he wanted to give me his ring, the snake ring. My eyes said no. He threw it from the cliff into the sea. The shining arc it described in the sunlight burned into my heart. No one will ever learn these all-important things about us. The scribes’ tablets, baked in the flames of Troy, transmit the palace accounts, the records of grain, urns, weapons, prisoners. There are no signs for pain, happiness, love. That seems to me an extreme misfortune.