He understood that kind of love, not the whining adoration coming at you constantly as songs on TV and the radio. He’d like to swallow both Ieva and Monta, they’d be in his stomach — Ieva’s wisdom and their daughter’s beauty, everything together in one place, home. He didn’t know how to love, only wildly desire, and it was among the Ancient Greek heroes that he found where he belonged. Here, in prison, there was no shortage of jealous women just like Hera, who murdered her rival’s children and took sleep away from her so she would have to wander the world like a ghost; until Zeus took pity on her and gave her the power to remove her eyes so she could finally rest. There were those like Danaus, who made his daughters kill their husbands. Or those like Tantalus who, in an act of unbelievable arrogance, sacrificed his son and offered his flesh to the gods. And those like Demeter who, distraught by a great loss, blindly ate everything the goddess of fate put before them, even the flesh of others, and not to mention such delicacies as sorrow, desperation, and alcoholism. Here you could find Ares with all his evil forces, whose sons were Terror and Fear, and who found joy in bloodshed.
Andrejs liked the retelling of these stories because they were about a time before anyone had been crucified for the sins of others, and before anyone had been saved.
Prison was the place where priests fished for souls day in and day out like pearl divers — forever looking to take confession. This frightful, shaved, robust, dark-eyed mob, a priori guilty, was the perfect material onto which they could cross-stitch those pearls.
He went to mass and listened, but never for a moment felt in his heart the main thing the priests asked them to feel — the desire to fall at the feet of Christ and call him their Lord and Shepherd, to transfer the responsibility for what they’d done onto their Lord and Shepherd and to beg for forgiveness. Andrejs could fall at the feet of Christ like he’d fallen to the floor next to the dead body of a stranger in a darkened cell. There was no question that Christ had definitely been a regular guy. He could wash Christ’s feet and trim his toenails, like he’d done on more than one occasion for an aging cellmate who had been exhausted to the point of lethargy. But he was unable to feel the most important thing — the desire to shift his guilt onto the shoulders of some Lord. Andrej’s guilt was his business, it was a part of him. Here he stood with his entire life and was completely aware of it. Though it was hazy, he could sense his freedom and responsibility within it.
King Oedipus, having unwittingly killed his father and married his mother, was unable to afford a single indulgence. The curses came true, but there were never any indulgences. No one had ever been crucified for Oedipus. He had to accept blindness as his fate all on his own. He had to accept himself for what he was and stab out his eyes, and wander the road with his walking stick, mourning his fate and that of his children.
In turn the Ancient Greeks were stingy with lessons. There were only two in the entire book — a lot like those real thoughts a person could think of in a lifetime. Both lessons were briefly laid out in a section about Medea and Jason in Corinth.
“But the happiness, honor, and praise they had hoped for never came to their Greece. Her own words came true: ‘Bloodshed begets bloodshed.’”
Medea had murdered her brother for Jason.
The goddess of love, Aphrodite, who gave so much joy and happiness to people, was also often merciless. “Passion that is more powerful than conscience brings the worst kind of evil to mortals.”
Medea had murdered children for Jason.
Andrejs remembers the moment he read those words, down to the smallest detail. His four cellmates snored away in their dark cell, which was hot from the stove and thick with bodily odors. He was lying on a bottom bunk facing the window; outside, a November storm carried a large, white lamp back and forth, so it looked like someone had hung a full moon up by a string and was waving it over the prison wall. The corners of the cell rustled with cockroaches and a draft, and Andrejs’s blanket glowed from the flashlight he held under it. Having finished reading about Medea, he turned a stony gaze upward to the metal bedsprings above him.
The woman was lying there with her eyes open.
Andrejs’s arm had fallen asleep. But to the point where he couldn’t take it anymore. He woke up — or rather, snapped back from his trance-like state of thinking — and tried to pull his arm out from under the woman’s back, and when he glanced at her he saw that she was lying with her eyes open. When had she woken up?
Afraid that she’d say something and interrupt the story, he instructed:
“Sleep some more!”
The woman obediently closed her eyes.
That night with Medea he’d been healed, because he’d finally seen himself from the sidelines. A tall, immobile, idiotic sack under a thin prison blanket.
That night they let him go. Enlisted him in the reserves. He knew that he would never kill anybody again. Not even Ieva.
Something had ended, the passion suddenly broken. Turns out his fate had been hanging at the end of such a fine strand of hair. Now it had matured, fallen out and slipped away. The shedding of an unnecessary skin.
How strange — when love was flowing through him he didn’t need anything, not even his only shirt. He had done terrible things, but they could all be justified. His, Andrejs’s, love.
Now that it had burnt out, he could start anything, though nothing would give him his fill. And he couldn’t imagine what more he could need that would fill the massive space surrounding him.
Andrejs didn’t even try to understand what happened in his brain when he read the story about Medea. Maybe the two things just fell into place — Medea and the release of his own passions — and both of them had nothing else in common but the horrible events over the course of a single night.
Maybe Aphrodite had never meant to be there in the first place? On that night, had the goddess of love ripped the deeply-lodged, festering arrow from Andrejs’s heart, and then disappeared without a trace? Without the core of the arrow his body crumpled like an empty shell.
He remained half way without Ieva, without reason, without a future. He knew that from there on out things would be calm and he would soon be released. He was a broken clock, a defective mechanism — why fight it? They don’t keep people like that in prison.
In truth, he should have stabbed out his eyes that very night.
“Want some champagne?”
The question spoken into the homey darkness scared the hell out of Andrejs because the woman shot it out as suddenly as a flare gun.
She had been lying there with her eyes open again.
He asked:
“Now?”
“Why not?”
They pulled themselves to their feet, turned on the kitchen light and rubbed their bleary eyes. He watched the movements of her plump elbows. The kitchen was small, and the woman filled the space right away. Andrejs liked this — just watching. He was ready to go sit in one of the corners when the woman said:
“Hand me those glasses!”
“Where?”
“On the shelf by your head.”
He turned toward the wall and came face to face with his own drawing. He stared at it for a long time, as if seeing a ghost, and then asked the woman:
“What’s that?”
“Glasses.”
“I see the glasses. But behind them?”
“That? Oh, that. A card.”
Andrejs very carefully took two fragile champagne flutes in his calloused hands and handed them to the woman. Then he took the card leaning against the wall behind the glasses and sat on a stool next to the small table. He studied the yellowed paper as intensely as a war refugee who’s been pulled from the water and given a passport, and who can’t believe this thing could save his life.