I know that she is coming, but when the door swings open to reveal her, I am not ready. She stands, tall and composed, and splattered head to foot with her husband’s blood. I have seen everything up until this moment, and I have ached so intensely with sorrow that there was no space in my body for fear.
Until now. I feel myself come alive, every inch of my skin prickling with it. The door closes behind her and we are alone. Her eyes are fixed upon me through the wash of blood across her cheeks.
I fling myself at her feet before I know what I am about to do. I am so seized with terror, so afraid at what she has come to offer me. I clasp my arms about her knees and turn my face up towards her.
She flinches at the sight of my tangled hair, my begrimed skin, the desperate light of madness that animates me. She cannot step backwards, cannot get away from me.
She speaks, trying at the same time to gently prise my fingers loose, but I lock them more tightly. I cannot make sense of what she is saying, my head too wild to translate the Greek. I shake my head fervently, because I am sure that she means to show me mercy and I cannot bear it.
She looks back into my eyes. I know she is reluctant; that she cringes away from seeing me truly, but I have her now as I hold her gaze, as I try to make her see what I can see.
Emptiness. Nothingness. My home and everything I know annihilated. Dust blowing on the breeze, carried out over the pitiless ocean.
Do not make me live on here, I implore her silently. Do not condemn me to a life among strangers. I have lived an outcast in my own family; do not make me one here in a place where I am nothing but a conquered enemy, forced to live out years of futile yearning for a world that is lost forever.
I see comprehension dawning on her face. Through the blood smeared on her cheeks and the dirt and dust that cling to mine, we see into the calm centre of each other’s souls.
I loosen my hold on her skirt and move my hand to hers. Now it is I who is gently unclasping her fingers, revealing what lies in her palm.
She carries a dagger. Her life is a precarious one; she has murdered the king, and her fate hangs in the balance as much as my own. She will defend it for herself; she has the stomach for battle, she is as ferocious as her lionesses snarling in stone. But it is her compassion I seek, and beneath her monstrous exterior I can see she overflows with pity, and I know that she will help me. It was her pity that I feared; her pity that might have driven her to offer me a future, some attempt at comfort, an exhortation to carry on, to make a life out of any fragments I have left to me. But I know that I can make her understand what it is that I need.
She shakes her head just a little as I guide her hand. As I hold it suspended above my breastbone, the sharp blade poised over the fluttering pulse beneath my skin, my other hand still clutches at her knee in supplication.
‘No,’ she says, and I hear a trembling in her voice. She yanks her hand away.
I twist her skirt in my clenched hand. It is damp from the bathwater; from Agamemnon’s final struggles, his flailing desperation. She cut down the king of all the Greeks, the leader of a thousand ships that thronged the Trojan shores for so long. She cannot be afraid to take the life of one woman.
My skull aches with a dreary, familiar pain. It is an injury never allowed to heal; the ragged, gaping edges of the wound from Apollo’s relentless violations that rip my mind open, again and again. I search for a way to make her see, to make her understand. I only want this pain to stop. Helen promised me that Clytemnestra was kind. I hope with everything I have left within me that it is true.
She takes a step back and I let the twisted fabric fall away from my fist. The soft light of morning falls through the narrow window behind her, and she is a dark shadow, an indistinct silhouette. Then she turns her head and I see her profile; brave and fierce. And then she looks back to me, and I see the white gleam of her eyeballs, and my throat dries up over the words I don’t need to say.
28
Clytemnestra
I pull back from the Trojan woman when she brings my dagger to her breast; an instinctive horror making me look away from her. But even as I stare into the creeping light spilling dimly through the window, I see only the despair in her face. I think of Iphigenia, poised on the threshold of a future that belonged to her; a future that shattered like a vase dropped on stone tiles.
This woman, I think, is dead already. It comes to me in an abstract flash of clarity; a moment of absurd calm. She is a ghost of Troy: a citizen of a world lost in flames and crumbled to ash. Iphigenia roams the dark bowels of the earth, her life stolen from her. Elektra screams with rage and yearning, and a pain I do not know how to begin to heal. But here, before me, there is a gift I can bestow. A suffering I can ease.