Cassandra

‘Assuming they believed Helen was with us. Suppose they were the kind of people who could never get over an insult that a woman, be she beautiful or ugly, inflicted on a king, a man?’ (As I said that, I was thinking of Panthous, who seemed to hate me since I rejected him. Suppose they were all like that?)

‘Father,’ I said urgently, in a way I never spoke to him again. ‘No one can win a war waged for a phantom.’

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 would have taken more perseverance than a man could muster to go on mouthing a name that tasted increasingly of ashes, gangrene, and decay.

I tried to hide from myself the sorrow that sometimes descended on me, black, from out of the sun.

He laughed many times, he had become a man. I could not take my eyes off him. I could not catch his eyes. Where had his handsome face gotten that crooked line; what sharpness had etched his once soft features?

‘What you decided is to feed the beast in yourself, to arouse it inside you.’ His cruel, masklike smile. But what did I know about this man?

You can tell when a war starts, but when does the pre-war start? If there are rules about that, we should pass them on. Hand them down inscribed in clay, in stone. What would they say? Among other things they would say: do not let your own people deceive you.

The absent Paris was celebrated in song. Fear lurked inside me.

What I regret more than anything else is that, in the beginning, I too gave in to the feeling that for now I was living only provisionally; that true reality still lay ahead of me: I let life pass me by.

How long it has been since I thought about the old days. It is true what they say, the approach of death does make your whole life pass before you.