Warm under the stars, the daphne fragrant, his sea terrace tiles smooth underneath our feet, we sat alone, some rooster vaguely saluting the night, the movement of the surf faint, almost lost. I crushed some daphne in my palm, remembering their four-pronged flowers, remembering—remembering Alcaeus after his field games, his javelin and discus throwing, his flushed face, his eyes lit, his mouth hungry for mine. Remembering—was he remembering, too?
“There was no daphne where I was,” he said, his voice sullen. “It would have been better to have died there, than come home like this.”
“It’s spring, Alcaeus, don’t talk like that,” I said, and wondered what spring might signify to him.
He did not speak for a while, then quietly, as though to himself, or from another world, he repeated lines we had loved:
“The gods held me in Egypt, longing to sail for home, for I had failed to seek their blessing with an offering...”
His voice had not changed, I realized with a start. Surcharged with new meaning, it entered my being, as he went on about the galleys and the old men “deep in the sea’s abyss.”
The phrase haunted me because it was he who lived in an abyss.
As days passed, defeat was all that we heard in our town, not outright defeat, but capitulation—retreat combined with truce, truce necessitated by deception. Or was it confusion? The soldiers I met, after their drunken reunions, spoke of the war with bitterness. Ten years, they said. Ten years, for what? And how many of us came back? Those who had been away longest considered themselves outcasts and those who had returned during the war complained, unable to recognize their families.
Standing on the wharf, I familiarized myself with the fleet, its remnants, anchored forlornly in the bay, boys swimming around the hulls, the decks bone dry, hawsers trailing, a door off its hinges, the cordage so rotten a gull might topple a spar. Disgust in my mouth, I tasted the waste of life, Alcaeus’, my own, my friends’.
What is life for, but love?