Ithaca Read Free Page B

disappeared.”
    â€œHe was killed?”
    â€œHe disappeared.”
    â€œTell me about it.” He closes his eyes. “Tell me everything.”
    Easier said than done. The Trojan War, which ended eight years ago, was a poisonous mixture of trade, diplomacy, and sex that drew in every city and island in Greece. Troy, on the straits leading to the Black Sea, charged tolls on the straits trade and became richer than any Greek city. A Trojan diplomatic mission ended in disaster when Paris—son of the Trojan king and a fast-moving boy with a lady-killer’s smile—broke hearts around Greece and eloped with Helen, the fabulously beautiful wife of Menelaus. Menelaus’s brother, Agamemnon, happened to be Greece’s most powerful warlord. The elopement was the excuse for a massive Greek expedition to eliminate Troy. Odysseus, chief of Ithaca, sailed to join it on a hot June morning with six hundred companions, leaving his teenaged bride, Penelope, pregnant and weeping on the quayside.
    My mother, with me inside her.
    Like most invasions, the Trojan expedition was expected to be short and glorious. Instead it turned into an attritional nightmare played out in Troy’s mosquito-infested marshes, where the Greek leaders squabbled and the soldiers died in pointless skirmishes, while the massive walls of Troy, impervious to any technology we Greeks possessed, remained unbreached.
    I know it’s wrong of me to talk of the war like this. Fighters are supposed to love battle—it’s what they live for—and I’m a fighter’s son. In the mouths of storytellers, the Trojan Warturns into something different: a heroic tale of valor and single combat, of bloody skirmishes and stirring speeches that keep audiences rapt in every tavern in Greece. When a new storyteller comes to Ithaca, the tavern is packed to the rafters, fishermen, traveling peddlers, and servants all listening with breathless attention. Even I get drawn into it then. Sitting under those blackened beams hung with ancient harpoons, fishermen’s charms, and the dried-out beak of a swordfish, breathing in that reek of aniseed and grilled fish, eyes smarting from the charcoal braziers, ears filled with the storyteller’s nasal drone and the thrumming of the instrument he plucks to accompany his tale, I hear my father’s name, and suddenly the tears are running down my cheeks. By the time the story ends I’m sitting there quite sure—quite, quite sure—that my father, the hero of the Trojan War, is the greatest man in Greece.
    I don’t think it was really like that, though, so I tell Mentes the story the way I imagine it might actually have happened: war, pure, simple, and without heroics.
    The war ended after eight years—ten, say the storytellers, rounding up for poetic effect—with Troy a smoking ruin and the surviving Trojan aristocracy herded aboard Greek ships as slaves. After much feasting, the Greeks built a massive shrine, hoisted anchor, and sailed for home, Odysseus and his Ithacans among them. One by one each leader reached his destination—all except my father, who was never seen again.
    â€œHe left Troy eight years ago,” I say.
    Mentes dips a morsel of bread in his wine and swallows it. For a while he doesn’t speak. Then he says, “You’re an unusual boy.”
    â€œI don’t think so.” I can feel his white eyes boring into me. I can’t meet them. I can feel myself blushing.
    â€œYou’re more like Odysseus than I thought when I first saw you.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œYou’re clever, you’re good with words, and you think things out for yourself. Have you heard any news of Odysseus since?”
    â€œNothing. We ask every ship that arrives here. There’ve been rumors. We follow them all up, but they never lead anywhere.”
    Mentes touches his goblet to his mouth but barely tastes the wine. “Meanwhile,