Chapter Fifteen: Pieces and Empty Space
She let that sit for a while, and then she put the cup down.
“My question.”
“Go on.”
She did not go on straight away.
She looked out over the basin, where the reeds were grey and the light was going flat, and he understood that she had been carrying this up here for a very long time with nowhere to put it down.
“What is it all for,” she said.
“What is what for.”
“Do not.
All of it.
A woman is born, and she carries water up a hill for sixty years, and then she is one of the heaps behind that wall, and the water still wants carrying, and somebody else carries it.
What is that for.
What is the point of the whole of it.” She turned to look at him.
“You have been dead.
You are the only person I am ever going to meet who has been dead.
So you can tell me.”
Lysandros laughed.
He could not help it and he could not stop it quickly, and it was not a good laugh, and Marpessa watched him do it with no expression on her face whatsoever.
“I am not laughing at you,” he said.
“I promise you that.
I am not laughing at you.”
“Then what.”
“Two thousand years,” he said.
“Where I came from there are men who do nothing else for their entire lives except sit and think about that question.
There are buildings full of them.
There are more books written about it than there are stones on this hillside, and they argue with each other and write more, and they have been at it without a break since about two hundred years before now.
“And here you are, on a step, in a valley with forty three people in it, with a bowl in your lap.
Same question.
Almost the same words.
And after all that time and all those buildings I cannot give you an answer, because nobody ever got one.”
“Nobody got one.”
“Nobody got one.”
“Then tell me what people say,” said Marpessa.
“That is an easier question and I will answer it properly.” He put his back against the doorpost.
“It depends entirely who you ask.
Every answer is somebody’s answer and none of them agree, and they cannot all be right and they can all be wrong.
“Some say gods made it and the point is to find out what they want and do it, and there is a reckoning afterwards and it goes well or it goes badly.
That one is the most popular by a distance.
Where I came from, more people held some version of it than are alive in the whole world today.
“Some say there is no afterwards, and the point is only to live rightly in the middle of it, and that is enough and there is no more.
“Some say all of this is one thing pretending to be many things, and the point is to stop pretending.
“Some say you come round again when you die, over and over, and you keep coming back until you have learned whatever it is, and the point is to stop having to come back.”
“And which one is right.”
“Not one of them can be checked,” said Lysandros.
“That is the thing nobody likes.
There is no test.
Every one of those answers has had four hundred years of clever men defending it and not one of them has ever been able to put it in a bowl and show it to somebody who disagreed.”
Marpessa waited.
“You are stalling,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I did not ask what people say.”
“You have had your question.”
“I have had an answer about strangers.”
“Those were your terms and you set them,” said Lysandros.
“I want it noted that a woman who would not take eleven measures of barley is now asking for a second one on credit.”
“Boy.”
“All right.”
He was quiet for a bit, working out where to start.
“The first part is not mine either,” he said.
“I want to be honest with you about that, because you are going to think I have made it up and I have not made up any of it.
The first part is old and some of it is Greek and you may even have heard it.
“There were men in your own country, hundreds of years before now, who said that everything there is, is small pieces and empty space.
That is all.
Not fire and water and earth.
Pieces too small to see, in enormous numbers, knocking about, and the pieces do not want anything and are not going anywhere, and everything that exists is those pieces in one arrangement or another.
A rock is an arrangement.
A goat is an arrangement.
You are an arrangement, and when you stop, the pieces do not stop, they go and be something else.”
“I have heard something like it,” Marpessa said slowly.
“Not from anybody I liked.”
“They were right.
That is the difficult part.
They were guessing and they had no way to check it and they were right, and almost nobody listened to them for two thousand years.” He shrugged.
“And nothing in that arrangement was aimed.
Nobody set it up.
There is no plan and there is nothing the plan is for.”
“How small are the pieces.”
“There is no honest way to tell you.
If I say a grain of sand you will picture a grain of sand and you will be wrong by more than you can hold in your head.
Take every grain on the shore down there.
That is the wrong scale and it is still far too big.”
She was staring at him.
“And the lights,” he said, because he had started now and there was no sense stopping.
“Every one of those in the sky is a sun.
Not a lamp and not a hole and not a god.
A sun, like ours.
Most of them bigger.
Ours is not important and it is not in the middle of anything.
“There are more of them than there is any way of saying.
And all of that has been turning for so long before there were any people at all that the whole of everybody, every person there has ever been, is a scratch at the very end that you would not be able to find.
And it goes on afterwards.
It does not need us.
It will not notice.”
“You cannot know that.”
“Some of it I was told and some of it I was shown, and I could not prove one word of it to you here if I had the rest of my life.
So take it as a thing I believe and not as a thing I have shown you.”
“And the rest,” said Marpessa.
“There is a rest.
You have got the face on you again.”
“The rest is another man’s words,” Lysandros said.
“I am going to recite him.
I want you to know they are his and not mine, because I could not have said it as well and I have never been able to get out from under it.”
“Who is he.”
“He is not born yet.
He will be born about nineteen hundred years after you are in the ground, in a cold country a very long way north of here, and he will go mad at the end of his life, and I have always thought the two things were related.”
“Say it, then.”
So he said it, and he had to build it in Greek as he went, and the Greek was worse than the original and he told her so first.
“The gods are dead.
They are still dead, and we are the ones who killed them, and there is no water anywhere in the world that will wash that off our hands.
“What were we doing when we cut this earth loose from its sun?
Where is it going now, with nothing holding it?
Is it falling?
Which way is down?
Is there a down at all?
“We are walking out through an endless nothing, and the empty air of it is on our faces, and it is getting colder.
It has been getting colder for a long time and it is not going to stop.”
Marpessa sat on her step and did not say anything for a long while.
The light went off the top of the reeds.
Somewhere down the hill a dog started and then thought better of it.
“Say the name,” she said.
He said it.
It came out badly in the mouth of a Greek and she tried it twice and could not get near it, and gave up.
“He never came here.”
“He is never going to come here.
Nobody in this world will ever hear one word of him except you.” Lysandros turned his hand over.
“There is nobody I can say that to and be believed.
So you are it.
You are the only person in the whole of this age who is going to know that a man existed who said that, and you cannot tell anybody, because they would think you had gone soft.”
“That is a wicked thing to hand somebody.”
“Yes.”
“You knew it was when you started.”
“I did,” he said.
“You asked me for the true one and I have wanted to say it out loud to another human being for about five years.”
Marpessa pulled her shawl up round her shoulders.
“I have been watching them go thin for twenty three years,” she said.
“I have known it since I was younger than you.
Every year the offerings get smaller and the answers get slower, and nobody up here will say it, and I have never once had the words for it.
I have had it in my chest with nowhere to put it since I was a girl in Thessaly.” She was not looking at him.
“And a boy of twelve comes up my path and says it back to me in a dead man’s words.
I do not know whether you have done me a kindness or not.”
“Neither do I.”
“Then it is the worst thing anybody has ever said to me,” she said, “and I am glad somebody said it.”
He got up to go, and that was when she did it.
She did not do it cruelly.
She said it slowly, working it out as she went, the voice of a woman turning something over in her hands to see where the crack was.
“Four nights ago,” she said, “you sat down in the dark and cut a dead man’s name into a piece of lead, because you could not bear the thought of losing it.
And then you said out loud, to nobody, in the cold, that you were going to burn a city to the ground because that man asked you to when he was dying.”
Lysandros did not answer.
“There is nothing,” said Marpessa.
“No plan, no point, nobody arranged it, and all of it is pieces and empty space and it is getting colder.
That is what you have just told me.
And you keep a dead man in a pot, and you have kept a promise you made at seven years old, in a country you were not born in, every day for five years, and you came up my path this morning at a run because the pot spoke back to you.
“So which is it.
Is there nothing, or is there that.”
He stood on the path below her step with his hands at his sides.
He had an answer to this.
He knew he had one, the way you know there is a word and cannot make it come.
He reached for it and it was not where it should have been.
“I do not know,” he said.
“That is the second time today.”
“Yes.”
“Then go home.” She picked her bowl back up.
“You have had your question and I have had mine.”
He was ten paces down the path when she spoke again.
“Boy.”
He stopped.
“Do not go back up to that wall.
Not tomorrow, not next week, not until I have told you the thing I would not say this afternoon.”
“Tell me now.”
“No.
It has taken me all day to get it into words I am willing to use and I am not going to spoil it in the dark on a path.” She stood in the doorway with the last of the light behind her.
“But I will give you enough of it that you sleep badly and come up here early, because that is what you deserve for this afternoon.
“There was no skill in what you did up there.
None.
It did not answer you because of the knock.”
“Then why.”
“Because of what was standing there knocking,” said Marpessa, and went inside, and shut the door.