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.

I had forgotten all that until now. Because I did not want to admit that a woman could crave death. And because her death made ash of everything we had known of her before.

Between killing and dying there is a third alternative: living.’

We suspected, but mostly did not want to know, what things lay behind her that still lay ahead of us. ‘Better to die fighting than to be made slaves,’ her women said.

She was not merely fighting the Greeks; she was fighting all men.

I could not say a word about the night when the Greeks killed the captives. Aeneas did not ask. His body glowed white, white in the darkness. He touched me. Nothing stirred. I wept. Aeneas wept. They had finished us. Desolately we parted. Dear one. When we really parted later on, there were no tears, no comfort either. Something like anger on your side, resolution on mine; each of us understood the other. We were not yet through with each other. To separate that way is harder, easier.

Twelve times the red-hot iron burned out of us that place from which pain, love, life, dreams can come. The nameless softness that makes human beings human.

This was the low point or the high point of the war. The coldness inside me. Andromache lying inanimate on the ground. And Polyxena’s face, which suited this occasion, the voluptuousness of self-destruction. The contemptuous way she threw her bracelets and chains onto the mountain of gold, which still fell a little short of the weight of Hector’s corpse. We were learning new things at a dazzling rate. Until now we did not know that dead people were worth their weight in gold.

Next summer I saw her again; she was a changed person. I, too, was ready to become that changed person who had been stirring inside me for so long already, underneath the despair, pain, and grief. The first stirring I allowed was the stab of envy when the slave girl of Achilles went off I knew not where, clasping Oenone tightly. ‘What about me? Save me too!’ I almost cried. But I had still to experience what lay in store for me: the day when I lay on my wickerwork bed in a cold sweat knowing that Hector was entering the battlefield, and knowing that he was being killed.

I do not know how it happened; no one was ever allowed to tell me about it, not even Aeneas, who was present, although I felt no concern for his safety. In the deepest depths, in the innermost core of me, where body and soul are not yet divided and where not a single word or a single thought can penetrate, I experienced the whole of Hector’s fight, his wounding, his tenacious resistance, and his death. It is not too much to say that I was Hector: because it would not be nearly enough to say I was joined with him.

Too bad you’re not a man. You could go and fight. Believe me, sometimes that’s better.’ Better than what? We smiled.

Otherwise only our eyes spoke. Said that we loved each other. That we had to say goodbye to each other. Never again, Hector, dear one, did I want to be a man. I often thanked those powers which answer for our sex that I was allowed to be a woman. That I did not have to be present on the day we both knew you would fall