‘That’s not your fault.’
‘He can’t find peace,’ I whisper, and Georgios takes me in his arms. I wish that he wouldn’t. I don’t want comfort. There is no comfort for my father; nothing but a bitter thirst for revenge, a worse suffering than Tantalus in his desolate lake.
I rise early and stand in the doorway, watching the stars fade from the dim sky. He comes up behind me, places his hands upon my shoulders, and when I stay still and unresponsive, I hear him sigh as he retreats. Always, my thoughts return to that pit where my father’s ghost broods. Wearily, I turn back inside and search within the shadows for the little knife I have just for this purpose. I feel Georgios’ eyes following me as I pull a lock of my hair forward and slice it free with the blade. The ends of it are jagged and uneven, and I feel a fierce pleasure, imagining my wild appearance. It is years since a handmaid combed my hair and fussed at my clothes, trying to transform me into something other than what I am. I revel in my unadorned clothes and my knotted hair: Clytemnestra’s daughter, they whisper when they see me, noting my degradation, how she lets me live. I scorn the pity I get from the other women; I never speak of my sufferings, and so they believe I have been cast out from the palace, that she married me to a commoner to exile me from the family. No one would ever believe I walked away willingly.
‘Are you taking another offering to the tomb?’ Georgios asks. His tone is quiet and measured.
‘My father is dead,’ I answer. ‘This is all I can do for him.’
‘And when you’ve hacked off every hair from your head?’
‘Do you think I shouldn’t honour him any more?’
‘Of course you should honour him. I honour him, too.’
‘Then why do you disapprove?’
He looks so tired. ‘I’m sorry that I let you hear about Agamemnon in the Underworld. It hurts me too, to think about it.’
I sink on to the stool opposite him. ‘It was you who told me who my family really are. How we’ve suffered, how we’re cursed. The gods can’t forgive us until we put it right. We have to make the murderers pay.’
He drops his gaze, stares at the table. ‘I don’t know if that’s true any more.’
My breath hisses out of me. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Is that what the gods want?’ he asks. ‘If we do it, will they be satisfied?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You’ve lived under the shadow of this curse all your life. You’ve learned from your family’s history that blood must be repaid in blood. But I’ve been farming, working on your father’s lands for all of mine. I learned it from my father, how everything dies away and comes back again, how we sow and reap the harvest every year. I’ve learned the rhythms of the seasons, and how even the harshest of winters is always followed by spring.’ He straightens his shoulders, sits up taller. ‘It’s a cycle constantly changing, but always the same. And your family’s curse, it’s like that, too. All the way back to Tantalus, your ancestors have done the same thing to one another. There’s a terrible crime, unbearable pain and then the lashing out of vengeance, and then it all begins again. I know it’s hard for you to see it, when the storms are raging and it’s impossible to imagine the dead earth will ever bring forth crops again. But it does – it always does.’
‘But if we don’t take vengeance, if my brother lets our father’s killers go unpunished, what will the gods do then? It’s our duty.’ I clutch at the lock of hair in my hand, the only thing I have to give my father until Orestes comes back. ‘A woman can’t kill her husband, a usurper can’t steal a throne, and neither of them pay. It’s an insult to the gods, to my family, to everything.’
‘But where does it stop?’ His vehemence startles me. I’ve never known Georgios like this before. ‘Can’t you see that it just goes on, over and over? The gods demand their justice, but we suffer for it, every time.’
‘Well, what else should we do?’
‘You could be happy.’ He reaches across the table for my hand. ‘You escaped your mother and Aegisthus. They have nothing to do with your life any more.’
I snatch my hand away. ‘My father is dead because of them.’
‘Many people have dead fathers, Elektra.’
The same words I flung at Clytemnestra once, more or less. I had spat my recriminations at her: many mothers lost daughters, it happens every day, why did she have to spend her life planning revenge? I shift uncomfortably. I hate to remember that I am her daughter; hate to think that what I know, I learned from her. ‘Perhaps those people have other family,’ I say at last. ‘But I lost my brother, too. I lost everything.’
‘We sent Orestes to live with his uncle, a king,’ Georgios says. ‘We sent him to a safe and happy life.’
Impatience consumes me. ‘How can we know that? If he lives as a prince, it’s no guarantee of safety. He could be thrown from his horse while hunting, gored by a wild boar, hurtled from his chariot in a race and mangled beneath its wheels. Disease could take him; no wealth in the world can cure a plague. He could be in the earth, buried without the touch of his sister’s hand.’ And if he isn’t dead, I don’t add, perhaps he enjoys the luxury of his life too much to jeopardise it. Like Chrysothemis, who never spoke a word against our mother, who hid away in the comforts of her rich marriage, who would never have dared to endure as I have done. I haven’t seen her since her wedding day, since her husband took her away to another palace, far from here, away from me and any chance I might have had to convince her to be my ally, my sister once again. She might as well be dead, too; all of them rotting in the ground whilst Clytemnestra sips wine and laughs with a man wearing Agamemnon’s robes, sitting on Agamemnon’s throne, wielding Agamemnon’s sceptre.
‘You’re right, we don’t know,’ Georgios says. ‘But you are alive, and your life is passing you by. Like Atlas, holding up the weight of the sky, never able to move beneath its terrible weight, you are stuck, waiting for Orestes to lift it from you.’ His sadness is palpable. ‘But I’ve always been here at your side, and I can bear it with you, if you’ll let me. If you can let it go.’
I can’t hear this. It’s the difference between me and Georgios, the ever-widening gulf that divides us from each other. He isn’t blood of the House of Atreus. His father died peacefully, slipping from the mortal world as though he fell asleep. Georgios doesn’t have to imagine his father’s shade, weeping in the Underworld, begging for justice, or he’d know it’s worth a lifetime of suffering. Clutching my shorn lock, I stride back to the door. ‘I won’t give up, even if you’re tired of waiting,’ I say.